Monday, December 10, 2012

Human diseases through the lens of network biology

A nice new review on the role of network biology in human genetics.

Furlong, LI. Human diseases through the lens of network biology. Trends in Genetics, in press (2012)[Cell]

Abstract

One of the challenges raised by next generation sequencing (NGS) is the identification of clinically relevant mutations among all the genetic variation found in an individual. Network biology has emerged as an integrative and systems-level approach for the interpretation of genome data in the context of health and disease. Network biology can provide insightful models for genetic phenomena such as penetrance, epistasis, and modes of inheritance, all of which are integral aspects of Mendelian and complex diseases. Moreover, it can shed light on disease mechanisms via the identification of modules perturbed in those diseases. Current challenges include understanding disease as a result of the interplay between environmental and genetic perturbations and assessing the impact of personal sequence variations in the context of networks. Full realization of the potential of personal genomics will benefit from network biology approaches that aim to uncover the mechanisms underlying disease pathogenesis, identify new biomarkers, and guide personalized therapeutic interventions.

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Auctioning Your Papers to Journals

I read an interesting blog post from Richard Smith today that brings up some ideas about how to avoid the rat race of publishing in top journals that have too much control over your work. Smith discusses the idea of auctioning your paper to different journals. He talks about writing a paper and then advertising its availability for publishing on twitter. He got four offers from journals to publish his paper and he picked the one he liked the best. You could imagine a scenario like this:

1) Write a paper
2) Post the paper to arXiv or similar
3) Revise the paper and address the comments and cristicisms raised on arXiv
4) Advertise the availability of the updated paper for publishing on twitter, your blog, or by emailing editors directly
5) Select from the interested journals

Once it catches on I think editors would start to search for worthy papers more actively.

As Editor-in-Chief of BioData Mining, I would be happy to hear from authors who have gone through this process.

About Me

Edward Rose Professor of Informatics,
Director of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics, Director of the Division of Informatics in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology,
Senior Associate Dean for Informatics,
The Perelman School of Medicine,
University of Pennsylvania